PC road racing lost its driving force when Papyrus Design Group opted out following this year's typically excellent NASCAR Racing Season 2003. One of the publishers swimming in Papyrus' wake is Codemasters, with their British-designed IndyCar Series. While, at times, quite pleasing and certainly not a bad game, IndyCar suffers from two problems. Firstly, it seems incomplete--as if the developer simply ran out of the time it needed to put the final critical pieces of the puzzle together. Secondly, although it is clearly intended to engage a studied racing simulation audience, IndyCar Series is not in the same frighteningly realistic realm of recent Papyrus and Electronic Arts road racing games. If you're new to this particular subgenre of virtual racing, you will find that IndyCar Series delivers enough action and challenge to keep you driving for some time to come. If you're an experienced racing simulation nut, you may be somewhat less enthusiastic.

All dressed up and ready to rumble, a flock of IndyCars crest a hill and head straight for the cameraman.

We'll get into the details in a moment, but let's first define just what it is that this game is simulating. Like Papyrus' late, great IndyCar Racing II, Codemasters' IndyCar Series strives to re-create the upper echelon of North American open-wheeled competition. However, that upper echelon isn't nearly the same now as it was back in 1995 when Papyrus had its last kick at the IndyCar can. Back then, IndyCars competed at a wide variety of venues--from ovals and superspeed tri-ovals to purpose-built permanent road courses and temporary through-the-city-streets tracks. This variety made for a superb and superbly versatile computer game, especially when paired with Papyrus' experience and expertise.

Yet not long after IndyCar Racing II arrived on retail shelves, there was a falling out in the real-life IndyCar ranks. What followed was a long and protracted conflict that hasn't even ended now, but suffice it to say that IndyCar split into two distinct factions. One of the two blocs--now known as CART--furthered its expansion into other countries and continues to this day to be a truly multidisciplined series, incorporating an assortment of track types from around the globe. The other group, the Indy Racing League, retained the rights to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, the Indy 500 event, and the IndyCar moniker. Its flagship series, the IndyCar Series, debuted in 1996 with a laughably small five-race season but has grown substantially ever since.

However, one of IndyCar's biggest potential downfalls is its track diversity. Or, rather, the lack thereof. Unlike CART, IndyCar eschews road courses and street circuits in favor of an oval-only approach. Even more than NASCAR, which is infamous for its sea of ovals but in reality offers several nonoval events, IndyCar is the current epitome of the "drive fast, turn left" mentality. Unfortunately, that's part of the problem with this game.

To wit, any racing game that deals with round and round ovals has a potential for being a might dull. Such was not the case with the Papyrus IndyCar series because Papyrus had constructed such a dynamic and realistic car model and such superbly distinctive and reactive circuits that no two tracks felt the same. Furthermore, the Papyrus game was able to spice things up by including all the nonovals that were featured in the real-life series at the time. Conversely, IndyCar Series is pure oval. That would be fine if the game's physics modeling and reactivity were sophisticated enough to make the overall experience feel appreciably different from circuit to circuit, but it isn't.

That's not to say developer Brain in a Jar didn't build unique and, at least, semi-authentic facilities. Indeed it did. In fact, most of its tracks are impressively representative of their real-life counterparts. Some are big, wide, and fully conducive to extremely high top-end speeds, while others are short, confining, and filled with wild gear shifts and braking. Some are heavily banked, and others, like the nearly rectangular Indianapolis course, are fearsome due to their lack of banking. This sort of thing nicely mimics the real world.

However, Brain in the Jar's cars, and their reactions to the driving surface, are simply not dynamic enough. Unlike IndyCar Racing (or Papyrus' NASCAR Racing series or EA's current F1 series), IndyCar Series doesn't do enough to convince you that you're sitting in a real, twitchy, dangerous racing machine. When you blast too fast into a turn, you don't feel the tires jumping and breaking away from the pavement. Instead, the game slowly drifts you up the track and (usually) into the wall. Granted, you will feel wheelspin and a loss of adhesion at certain times--like when you gun it too fast from a standing start, for example. In the most critical areas--the turns--the car remains rooted to the pavement, as if on rails, until it begins to inexplicably shift up toward the wall. Why the game allows you to drive so "hot" into a turn and so quickly through most of it before throwing you off your line near the end remains a mystery.

Unfortunately, another downside to IndyCar Series is that you don't feel like you have a 675 horsepower monster ready to spin your tires or throw you sideways if you do something foolish. Although you can do donuts from a standing start and shoot sideways if you accelerate too quickly in first and/or second gear, you don't quite sense that a momentary lapse of concentration might spell the end of your day. Racers who've come to IndyCar Series from an arcade racing background may find these quirks quite a bit less damning than sim veterans, but they are quirks nonetheless.

In IndyCar Series, getting airborne is easy but not recommended.

There are other reasons, apart from inadequate physics modeling, that keep IndyCar Series an average game. For example, manual car control is not permitted on pit lane. This is nothing short of pure annoyance for anyone who knows what they're doing out there. Yet the most critical, and surely the most infuriating, blunder is a complete and total lack of rearview mirrors. That's right. Either Brain in a Jar had its "brains in a jar," or it was compelled by a fast-approaching deadline to preclude rearview mirrors from a game that otherwise threatens to be a simulation. Though you can check the action behind you, via a quick "look behind" control, there is simply no excuse for not placing rearview mirrors in a game that pits you side-by-side with other intelligent but hell-bent drivers at 230mph.

Furthermore, whenever you do bang tires or other equipment with another driver or wall, you'll find the game's damage modeling to be curiously allocated and exhibited. IndyCar Series crashes are always accompanied by a liberal spray of featureless 2D polygons, bouncing hither and thither. These polygons seem to have no real purpose other than esthetics. Indeed, even in easy mode, where there is no damage, the very same polygons dance about the screen even after a gentle nudge against the wall. In pro mode, damage plays a far more prominent role. Here, you can be forced into the pits for repair or knocked clean out of the race by what would seem to be unrealistically light contact. On a more authentic note, if you do something foolhardy, such as drive backward into the pack, you're instantly out of the race.